Today I’ll be testing the five major browsers,
Google Chrome 10, Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9,
Opera 11 and Apple Safari 5 to see which is the fastest available.
Before we begin let me explain a bit about how I test.
All five browsers are on their latest non-beta release
with the exception of Firefox 4 where I used the Release Candidate.
All the browsers were tested using a fresh install with
no additional options enabled such as hardware acceleration.
Each test was run multiple times on the exact same Windows 7 computer.
The first test I ran was the JSBenchmark which is a good overall test of Javascript speed.
Here you can see that Chrome is considerably faster than the rest of the browsers due to
the new Crankshaft compiler.
However what’s more impressive is the fact that all browsers did really quite well,
a far cry from the mismatched results I’ve found in the past.
Next is the V8 Benchmark, Google’s own Javascript test.
Here I found very similar results with Chrome delivering much better performance
than the rest, although again Opera and Firefox put up very solid performance as well.
Now we have the Sunspider benchmark and here the results change quite a bit.
Internet Explorer 9 shows huge gains, beating out Chrome, Opera and Firefox by a short margin.
Getting out of pure Javascript tests now we have the Peacekeeper benchmark,
a great overall test of general browser performance.
Here Chrome and Opera do very well with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari falling behind.
Now we have the Flying Images test from the Internet Explorer 9 test suite.
This test is largely based on how well the browser taps into your GPU to display one
hundred spinning images.
Both Internet Explorer and Firefox get a perfect sixty frames per second
while Chrome and Opera get a much lower twenty and twenty-two frames.
Safari, which lacks any hardware acceleration to speak of gets a meager two frames.
Lastly we have the HTML5 test which evaluates
how well each browser adheres to the latest web standard.
Chrome does the best here however Firefox, Opera and Safari also do well.
So overall I was very impressed with all five browsers however the winner today
is Google Chrome. It remains the king of the hill in almost all speed tests,
has the best compliance with HTML5 and already has
solid optional hardware acceleration that likely will become standard soon.
Something to keep in mind is that no longer are there only one or two standout browsers
as all five are quite fast, HTML5 compliant and have their own unique features
so it really is hard to go wrong no matter what camp you’re in.
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